I recently found myself thinking about an animation I'd created in my first-year of University. The idea of it was to create a 40-50 second hand-drawn animation running at at 12 frames per second, I remember spending around 3 weeks on it around other University work and drawing around 500 frames on A4 paper. So I was a bit stumped why I had never included it on my portfolio.

Then I watched it back. At the time I had been in a bit of a rush to get the animation all compressed into a video. It was 3:00am the night before it was due, my scanner wasn't working and photographing with a DSLR camera was proving tricky. Which was when I remembered "you can create stop frame animations on a 3DS can't you?".

This lead to a real drop in the quality of the video and watching nearly 10 years on it's a bit difficult to make out what's going on at times. At the time it served it's purpose though and is actually one of the factors for my class mates asking me to join their groups to create the animations in 2nd and 3rd year projects.

So after all of this time I though it's finally get it uploaded but I also through that I could do a major over hall of the animation adding in new camera angles and developing the story a bit more. The  following is the rough pass of the upgraded animation that includes new scenes and traces of the original animation. The next step following this is to draw in a proper original character and up the frame-rate so that it all looks slicker.

Since I designed my OC Cammie, I've always had a plans to animate her or make some short comics featuring her. The little sloth was originally concepted as a mascot for a games and media website (Button Bash Gamers) and as a big gamer myself  I've got this vision of her being an overly excitable and over-energetic gamer. When it comes to outdoors activities well her lazy-sloth nature then takes over. Unfortunately while I always start getting plans together something always comes around to slow the progress.

Recently however I've found the motivation to actually start animating again. Primarily the animations I work are of the short-looping variety such as character animations for character models and sprites or motion effects for web applications. At university I did have a 30-40 second animation of a character a parkouring though a simple hallway and have done some longer motion-capture sequences but little else in terms of telling a short story.

Above is the first of what I am hoping to be a series of short animations featuring Cammie the Sloth and my avatar alter-ego Flatty. The next step is to draw out the animation itself. At present the plan is to either use ClipStudio which I have recently been trialling or Adobe Animate which I am also pretty new to.

The plan is to update this blog post with updates as to my progress regularly.

So I created my avatar back in 2014 after university, 6 years on I think my style has changed quite a bit and my long hair has gone so I thought he could do with an update.

Around the time I created him I was really into Shantae and the Pirates Curse and loved the art style so my avatar was influenced heavily by that along with a number of other drawings at the time.

The idea now was to match him up more with my other characters, Cammie the Sloth and Nibs the Gerbil.

Avatar Timelapse

Really want to do some more with my Sloth Kid but referring to her by that all the time wasn't really ideal...So now she's taken the name of Cammie!

So started off the exploration with just a couple of quick profile views for the character. Used to do some modeling in Maya which recently I'm tempted to try out again so this might come in handy!

I also wanted to get more of a feel of her personality so I continued on with a character study sheet for her. Felt afterwards that I need to work on my facial expressions so next time I experiment with that.

Artwork Timelapse Part 1 

Artwork Timelapse Part 2 

Here's the level designs for the cat game and the cat flap asset.

Cat Flap Design

So here's just a couple of designs for the cat game from early concepts to finals.

Final Animations

The panda posse trying their hand at Splatoons brutal and messy turf wars!

The panda posse struggling to get to grips with life in the commonwealth wasteland!

The first scenario with the whole Panda team, who are in the midst of an intense gaming session. Used for a short time on social media banners for GamersFTW, but unfortunately the site has now been taken down.

After creating Devito I wanted to draw him in some funny game related scenarios but thought he'd get a tad lonely all by himself. So I thought I'd make for him a little posse.

A couple of years ago I thought It would be fun to create a goofy avatar of myself. I toyed around with a couple of different hairstyles and tried out a couple of different outfits based on what I normally wear. Last thing to do was decide on some colours and throw in a must have gaming reference!

When I was writing for GamersFTW, we managed to hit 50,000 followers on Twitter. To celebrate several of the writers prepared a couple of special features and competitions to run. Me? I decided to dress my Avatar up in some Panda themed clothing to reference the sites gaming mascot.